Nights at the Circus

first editionHardcover

1984·London

by Carter, Angela

London: Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press, 1984. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/fine. 1st edition, preceding the American. Fine in fine dustjacket, with no need to look further, much in the same way that you need not travel around the world if your aim is only to count the number of cats in Detroit. A tribute to young woman as goddess, but this lively book is no little girl in her mother's pearls. Carter's genre fusing individualism unites realism, surrealism, and post-feminist lore in a wonderful distortion of the historical novel wherein time loses its meaning and magic mocks 19th century events. Fevvers, a baby, is found in a basket of eggshells and straw (pre-vision of the "duh" variety) on the doorstep of Ma Nelson's brothel. She is raised as the common daughter of 6 working mothers until, at the age of 14, the constant itching in her shoulders heralds the breaking out of her wings, symbolic of female liberty and volition. She matures some, works herself through a series of persecuted employments where she is exploited as a freak, and develops some of the qualities of a confidence woman, finally landing at the Cirque d'Hiver as the "aerialiste." There she becomes the new living legend, applauded by the rich and powerful around the world. She takes up with (but doesn't fuck) Walser, a journalist who joins the cirque as a clown to be near her. A train wreck, between Russian engagements, separates them in Siberia. He is saved by Olga, an escapee from a grotesque women's prison (a subplot with another of Carter's original takes on feminism), while Fevvers, hampered by a broken wing, is herself saved by a wandering male radical, whose political group is in league with Olga's activist society. In the end, Fevvers and Walser are reunited, but that's the only fragment of this novel that approaches normalcy, as Carter, liberated by her previous successes, secure as feminism's mythologist, and constrained only by the limits of her imagination, abandons all structure, and unleashes a new literary anatomy with all the gusto of a piece of machinery that has pulled up its bolts from the floor and gone off on its own. (Inventory #: 183)

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